Cinderella Shoes have opened a shop in the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre within the last couple of weeks. This shoe shop only stocks ladies shoes in larger sizes from size 8 to 12. I have blogged before about the lack of Irish shoe shops stocking any big sizes, so this is very big news for me!

The shop is located on the top floor of the shopping centre. It is painted purple and is beside the black Wrestling Mania shop, about half way down the same side as The Laptop Shop (the opposite side to the art gallery and toilets).

Cinderella Shoes opened a concession in Arnotts a few years ago, but whenever I visited, all I found was a couple of small shelves right at the back of their massive shoe department. So, I am thrilled to see a proper shop at long last dedicated solely to ladies with large feet (sorry about the pun there!). I dropped in last weekend to have a look and enjoyed the novelty of just being able to pick up shoes on the shelves and put my foot straight into them. My size 9 foot is extremely wide, and I was even able to even get into a couple of size 8s. They still have some Winter styles on sale, mainly boots, with knee high boots for only 60 euro in some cases. The Spring/Summer stock is arriving daily at the moment, and there were already some colourful sandals in the shop when I visited. They also stock a lot of more formal evening shoes, which is the trickiest type to find in large sizes.

Before you start hyperventilating, you won’t see anything Manolo-esque there and it’s not exactly Faith or Office either. Nevertheless, when you struggle to find even one shoe in your size in most other Dublin shoe shops, you should still feel like me in a sweet shop here. It’s one small step for mankind, but one giant leap forward for Dublin women blessed with big feet. Hopefully the Cinderella Shoes store will get plenty of promotion ensuring that they finally have a shop where they can find shoes to fit them.

This day only comes around every 4 years so maybe the novelty factor has me a bit giddy today, or perhaps it’s just an extra dose of that crunchie Friday feeling.

The Luas smart card machines are feeling a bit peculiar too. It seems that they don’t know about leap years, so they overcharged some people this morning when they tagged off. I heard on the radio that the machines have therefore been turned off for the day and smart card users can travel for free. I may just go wild and head all the way to the ends of the earth, otherwise known as Sandyford. I’m sure that would cure my giddiness in no time!

It’s nice that the shiny new, if rather black, Hosting 365 site is fully aware of the day that is in it though. It’s a bit confusing that register365.com is now the brand for all their standard shared hosting plans, but the clever logo change made me smile:

Finally, it’s Work Life Balance day today. Perhaps they picked today because we don’t normally have the luxury of this day, so if you can’t get a bit of “me time” today there is no hope! Separating life and work, and getting them in proportion, has been my biggest challenge since I started freelancing. When you are self-employed, you have far more flexibility and control over when and how you work than employees, but despite this, it can be extremely tricky to get the work life balance right. That balance is different for everyone, and this is something that I think I will always have to work on, since I have always tended to let work invade my life too much regardless of the job! However, I have been working from home for over a year now and have learned lots along the way. The crazy days of all work and no play are much rarer now. However much you love your work, make sure you don’t let life pass you by.

A little book caught my eye while paying in Dubray books: ‘The Essential Guide to Apartment Living in Ireland‘ by Robert Gogan. At 15 euro for under 200 A5 pages, I thought it was a bit steep. I had a quick flick through it and it looked well thought out. I was further encouraged when I saw that it has only just been published. Being an apartment owner, I thought that it could be a wise investment. After all, it costs less than 3 tubs of Ben and Jerry’s!

I have had a good read of some chapters already, and I think that it’s a handy book to have. It’s well laid out with sections on buying, what you own, management, day to day life, finance, legal matters and insurance. There is a helpful glossary at the back too. The author has both a legal and property management background, which makes for a good mix - the book is very thorough, but it focuses on the practical issues. So while it explains all about management agencies etc, it also has helpful advice on how to deal with troublesome neighbours. Best of all, it is written in plain English, despite the somewhat complex nature of the legal aspects of apartment living.

I’ve already picked up a few things I was not aware of. I’ll be checking that I have my management company membership certificate for a start. Other points that I had a vague understanding of are much clearer now. While the material is not the most fascinating, the tone is quite down-to-earth throughout and it makes for lighter reading than I thought. The author shares his own view from time to time. Perhaps that’s not a great idea for a factual book like this, but it makes it a bit more entertaining. He informs us that there are “thousands of unreasonable people living all around us” and, therefore, “inevitably” “these individuals” will be in your apartment development. He finds that tenants do not “have as much regard for the considerations of their neighbours”, an opinion based on his own experience of 90% of House Rule breaches involving tenants.

Diversions like these may be better suited to a blog, and I discovered tonight that the book has an entire website to go along with it complete with forum, guestbook (how quaint!) and blog. It seems that you have to register to comment which I don’t like, but I think they are still working on the website, so that may change. While I know that neighbours.ie is great for individual developments, this is the first site I know of devoted to apartment living in Ireland in general, despite it being such a big niche. I’m increasingly out of the loop these days, so there are probably dozens of other websites already! Holler if you know any.

Keeping financial records is a vital part of running your own business, but with so many accounts software packages available at all sorts of prices, how do you know where to start? I have used 2 free programs to date: TurboCASH and QuickBooks Simple Start. For the benefit of anyone else who is currently looking into free accounts software, here’s a run through of what I liked and disliked about both programs.

TurboCASH was the first program I tried. On the plus side, TurboCASH is the kind of program that will suit people with an accounts background. You enter your transactions in journals, and then click a button to post to the ledger. There is also a double-entry T-account viewer available for each account that I found very handy. This use of traditional accounts terminology etc means that there is quite a learning curve for anyone without a basic knowledge of accounting. I still have a good grasp of accounts from school, but having been away from it all for a few years, I found I had to buy the TurboCASH Accounting Made Easy e-book for £14.95 to really get to grips with the program. The book goes into lots of detail on setting up TurboCASH and keeping accounts for both typical retail and service businesses. Once I worked through the tutorials, the program made a lot more sense. I also found the forum helpful when I was not sure how to treat unusual items in my accounts.

The interface does not look very slick, but I would not mind that if it did the job. My main problem with TurboCASH was that mistakes started creeping into the reports over time, particularly relating to transactions I had previously edited. Luckily, I had so few transactions that I was able to spot when reports did not look quite right and go back and fix things. When this happened a third time within 9 months, I stopped using the program, because accounting software that produces inaccurate figures is worse than having no software at all! The site does state that the software is in beta, so I realise that bugs are to be expected and that I used it at my own risk.

Before resorting to paper ledgers and red pens, I googled for alternative software and I came across QuickBooks Simple Start. Oddly, this software costs 72 euro + VAT + P&P if you look at the Irish QuickBooks site, even though it is available as a free download here at QuickBooks.com. The free version has been made with US users in mind, but the program is so basic that international users don’t really miss out on anything. Perhaps QuickBooks Ireland have added some fancy localised features for Irish users that justifies the price tag?!

Unlike TurboCASH, Simple Start is suitable for anyone to use, even if you have never kept any accounts before. The interface is a lot more visual and intuitive. The main screen is a diagram showing the path of money through your business, and you just click on the icon that you want to record something for (invoices, bank account, expense etc). There is no mention of posting, contra entries or other accounting lingo here. It’s plain English all the way - just money in and money out. There is very good help within the program, although it is so straightforward and intuitive that I have not needed to call on it much. Despite the easy interface, I like the way that you can still look under the hood at the raw ledger accounts and transactions by viewing ‘Accountant Reports’. You can also quickly run profit and loss and balance sheets for each month, the year so far, last year etc which is very handy. Backing up your accounts is also very quick (less than a minute), whereas after a few months of using TurboCash it used to take about 10 minutes!

I have been using QuickBooks Simple Start for about 2 months now and so far the only disappointment has been the lack of a cash flow report. I know that the whole idea of Simple Start is to just give you the basic features and reports that you need starting off, but a cash flow report is often the key report for a start-up. A minor niggle is that you don’t seem to be able to tag certain expenses as being part of cost of sales either. If you upgrade to QuickBooks Pro, you get cash flow reports and a ton more bells and whistles that I will probably never need as a freelancer. Again, there is a big price difference between buying the Irish version (370 euro + VAT + P&P) and the US version ($199.95 or $179.95 if you upgrade from Simple Start) of QuickBooks Pro. The US price is becoming more tempting as my business grows, but I will have to find out what I will miss out on if I don’t buy the Irish version. I do my own accounts at the moment, but if I ever start handing them over to an accountant, it could be false economy buying the US version if the accountants can’t work with those files or there are other issues. All that’s a bit down the line - for now the free version of QuickBooks does the job very well and my bank balance is happy with it too.